查看更多>>摘要：The bioenergy industry is a core component of the EU approach to reduce its dependency on non-renewable resources while attempting to support biomass producers and farmers in rural areas. However, bioenergy activities also pose governance challenges associated with intensified inter-organizational collaborations and network relations between farmers, bio-industries and other supply chain actors. Often, existing contractual arrangements, such as contract farming schemes, become inadequate and potentially unfair. Given this background, our study addresses how to design more effective contractual arrangements that facilitate bioenergy activities by incorporating farmers' perspectives. Our findings indicate that contracts that in the course of being formal and enforceable, are enriched in relational and procedural clauses are ranked as superior by the weaker party in the relation, i.e. farmers. The identified preferred configuration that we called swift relational contracting contributes to contract theory and ecological economics by providing insights into how relational, flexible and frequently adaptable contractual structures can fit with the requirements of emerging bio-based industries.
Floerchinger, DanielaFrondel, ManuelSommer, StephanAndor, Mark A....
1.1-1.17页
查看更多>>摘要：This paper empirically tests the impact of pro-environmental identity on environmental behavior by priming study participants with their previously stated attitude towards the environmentalist movement Fridays for Future. On the basis of a large-scale survey experiment including the incentivized choice between a voucher for a flight or a train ride, we find evidence that respondents who receive such an identity prime are more likely to behave in line with the movement's moral principles in that they take the train. The largest treatment effect is found for respondents with a negative attitude towards the movement, which is consistent with moral balancing. Our results suggest that pro-environmental behavior may be enhanced by reminding individuals of their attitude towards environmental matters.
查看更多>>摘要：Providing drop-off containers for recycling is a widely adopted strategy in developing countries to promote recycling and increase waste recovery rates. However, challenges such as container misuse, improper waste disposal, management difficulties leading to container overflow or collapse, and concerns about neighborhood cleanliness have highlighted the need for alternative approaches to complement existing recycling efforts. One potential solution is the implementation of a door-to-door recycling service. This study designs and implements a discrete choice experiment to elicit urban households' preferences for various attributes of such a system. Specifically, we examine how these attributes influence household participation in recycling schemes, particularly after prior exposure to drop-off recycling sites in their neighborhoods. To account for preference heterogeneity, we estimate mixed logit and latent-class models. Our findings suggest that the types of materials accepted for disposal and neighborhood cleanliness are the most influential attributes driving households' willingness to pay for a door-to-door recycling service. Additionally, socio-demographic characteristics, recycling motivations, and participation in recycling practices significantly shape household preferences. These insights offer valuable guidance for designing targeted policies and interventions to enhance waste management in urban areas.
查看更多>>摘要：Governments provide more than USD 800 billion annually in environmentally harmful subsidies at the global level despite international commitments. This paper introduces a novel and replicable framework for identifying biodiversity-harmful subsidies within national budgets. Our multidimensional approach is based on the five drivers of biodiversity loss: land use change, resource exploitation, climate change, pollution, and invasive species. Our framework evaluates subsidies across seven economic sectors - transport, housing, industry, agriculture, livestock, power generation, and digital deployment- based on their expected biodiversity impact (harmful, positive, mixed, neutral, or unclassifiable). We apply this framework to the French national budget and find that, in 2022, <euro>27.14 billion were allocated to subsidize harmful activities. Pollution is the most financially supported driver of biodiversity loss. Our analysis also reveals significant trade-offs, with 25% of climate-positive subsidies exacerbating land use pressures. The study calls for a sector-specific approach to subsidy reform. By codeveloping this framework with biodiversity experts and public authorities, we provide a decision-support tool to align public investments with pathways towards sustainability.
Ahmed, HaseebCorrea, Juan SebastianSitko, Nicholas J.
1.1-1.22页
查看更多>>摘要：The growing frequency and severity of extreme weather events has spawned a rapid increase in policies and programs designed to enhance the resilience of small-scale producers through the promotion of climate-adaptive agricultural practices. However, gaps exist in the conceptualization and measurement of farm-households' resilience in face of climatic stress. Furthermore, comparative evidence to understand the relationships between climate-adaptive practices, resilience capacities, and household wellbeing across diverse rural contexts remains scant. Using a novel approach to measure households' perceived resilience against climatic events, we empirically examine the relationship between perceived climate resilience, the adoption of climate-adaptive practices, and household wellbeing in a pastoralist setting in Kenya and a rain-fed cropping system in Zambia. To enable comparisons across these diverse settings, we use a typology of climate-adaptive practices based on their relative factor intensities or diversification decisions. Using the 'doubly-robust' inverse-probability-weighted-regression-adjustment (IPWRA) approach to account for potential selection issues, we find that capital-intensive strategies are consistently and positively associated with resilience, food security, and income in both contexts. Laborintensive and diversification strategies have generally positive but heterogeneous impacts across the two production systems, likely governed by contextual differences. Results also highlight the complementarity between different climate-adaptive practices in improving household welfare in both contexts. The findings suggest that enhancing resilience and improving overall wellbeing in small-scale producer settings requires multidimensional approaches. These include interventions that reduce the capital constraints that inhibit the adoption of capital-intensive adaptation practices, bundled with approaches that promote the simultaneous adoption of context specific labor-intensive and diversification practices.
Black, Michael A.Ahmadiani, MonaBagnall, Dianna K.Morgan, Cristine L. S....
1.1-1.15页
查看更多>>摘要：When farmers adopt conservation tillage, they are making a management change that is expected to improve manageable characteristics of soil health. The current literature on the value of soil health, however, primarily focuses on the value of inherent soil characteristics. In this paper we close the gap in the literature by estimating the value of improvements in soil health. Using a sample of farmers in Texas' Brazos River Watershed and a stated-preference discrete-choice experiment, we elicit preferences for improvements in water infiltration, surface compaction, and organic matter content, characteristics that can be realistically improved by adopting a conservation tillage. For soil improvements roughly equivalent to what could be achieved by adopting no-till, we find that, on average, farmers are willing to pay $50-100 per acre per year to improve water infiltration, $20-50 to reduce surface compaction, and $2-11 per acre to improve organic matter content. We examine preference heterogeneity using sub-samples of the population, latent class specifications, and mixed-logit models, and find substantial variation in willingness to pay across farmers. Our findings offer insights into the value farmers place on soil health, but also that there is a great deal of variation in those values, which may help explain why soil conservations practices are not widely used in our study region.
查看更多>>摘要：The burden of petrochemical pollution on communities of Color is well established, but the corresponding distribution of economic benefits is unclear. We evaluated employment equity in chemical manufacturing (NAICS 325) and petroleum/coal products manufacturing (NAICS 324) among U.S. states and core-based statistical areas (CBSAs) relative to racial education gaps, using data from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and Census Bureau. As a case study, we also examined local-level employment disparities and industrial tax incentives in Louisiana. People of Color were consistently underrepresented among the highest-paying jobs and overrepresented among the lowest-paying jobs in both subsectors. Disparities persisted on a local scale, including in Louisiana parishes providing large tax subsidies for job creation. For both subsectors, the strongest predictor of disparities in better-paying jobs was population diversity. Education gaps were not significantly correlated with observed disparities in either subsector. Collectively, our findings reveal systemic inequality in the United States' petrochemical workforce. The observed disparities appear to reflect institutional racism and are not solely due to the racial education gap, as some have suggested. Regulators should consider that current approaches to industrial permitting, which typically ignore the distribution of economic benefits, are likely to perpetuate this pattern of racial injustice.
查看更多>>摘要：In the context of economic policy advice, the common understanding of sustainability focuses on the preservation of natural capital. In the Anthropocene, which is characterised by anthropogenically induced, abrupt and/ or long-term, often irreducible ecosystem dynamics and a co-evolution of technology and environment, this understanding reaches its limits. We therefore propose three modifications: shifting the baseline from a static to a dynamic frame of reference, shifting the focus from system components to system properties (stability, functions), and finally moving to a post-Eurocentric and post-anthropocentric perspective. These modifications will in some respects lead to a more restrictive norm of sustainability but will in other respects leave more room for human intervention and the creation of hybrid ecosystems. The challenge, as we see it, is to adapt the concept of sustainability to the realities of the Anthropocene without weakening it (such as by advancing green-washing or a 'techno-fix ideology').
查看更多>>摘要：The direct material consumption of technological systems is connected to three challenges: the overall metabolism of the technological system; the growing material complexity of technologies; their reliance on critical or geologically scarce materials. These challenges are often examined in isolation, overlooking their interrelated nature. We propose a systematic, multi-level perspective, leveraging concepts from Ecology and Industrial Ecology, namely scale and product ecosystem. Indeed, when investigating empirically the material consumption of technologies, i.e. electronic products, it is essential to acknowledge their co-evolution and to explicitly define the boundaries of the scrutinized system. We exploit a dataset detailed in technology and material identification, to develop a longitudinal, bottom-up analysis disentangling the direct material consumption patterns at the market, functional group, and material levels over three decades in Europe. Results indicate that strategies improving the material consumption dynamics at one level of the system may have adverse effects at others. Reductions in materials consumption stem primarily from changes in the composition of the technological system rather than functional dematerialization. Notably, technological convergence, the shift from single-function to multi-functional devices, emerges as a significant contributor to reduced materials usage. However, the increasing functionality of technologies is at the same time the main risk of directing the electronic market towards a dependence from some specific critical and geologically scarce materials.
La Notte, AlessandraMarques, AlexandraPetracco, MarcoParacchini, Maria Luisa...
1.1-1.14页
查看更多>>摘要：Nature-related risks can lead to financial losses. The connection between ecosystems and socioeconomic systems is complex and multifaceted. Ecosystem services are the ecological processes that serve human needs. The degree to which a specific ecological process fails to meet specific human needs could be a useful metric able to ground the cascade of risks to which companies, governments, financial institutions can be exposed. Linking the ecosystem services dimension and the risk dimension is the first step in building a framework that introduces ecosystems into sustainable finance. The growing need to factor nature into financial and business decisions prompted the formation of a Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures, meant to develop a risk management and disclosure framework to report and eventually act on nature-related risks and opportunities. This paper describes how to use the Integrated system for Natural Capital Accounts to measure and account for ecosystem vulnerability, which constitutes the first component of nature-related risk. Based on ecosystem vulnerability accounts, it is possible to also assess sectoral exposure to risk. Ecosystem vulnerability accounts could represent a valuable source of information for the TNFD, enabling it to assess impacts and dependencies. A case study of the agricultural sector in Europe is presented.
NETL
NSTL
Elsevier